Shelly McNamara, head of equality and inclusion at Procter & Gamble, knows just how valuable it is to work at an inclusive company. Back in 2012, as a VP at P&G, she came out publicly as LGBTQ, and she’s since worked tirelessly to ensure that the organization is not only diverse but also a place where all employees feel like they can be their authentic selves. After more than a year of pandemic and political and racial tensions in the U.S. and other parts of the world, these issues have become even more critical for businesses to address, and McNamara points to specific DEI strategies that have proven effective in a variety of corporate environments. McNamara is the author of the book No Blanks, No Pauses: A Path to Loving Self and Others.
ALISON BEARD: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Alison Beard.
In March, 2012, our guest today gave one of the biggest speeches of her life. At the time, she was a middle manager at Procter & Gamble, the huge consumer goods company. She stood on a stage at its world headquarters with video cameras live streaming to locations around the world and said:
SHELLY MCNAMARA: I am Shelly McNamara, the vice president of human resources and beauty and grooming. I am a mother, a life partner, a sister, and an aunt. I am also gay.
ALISON BEARD: She went on to talk about how important it is to feel like you can be your real self at work. Today, Shelly is chief equality and inclusion officer at P&G, which means that she’s responsible for making sure that all of its 100,000 employees feel welcome and valued in the organization. And after more than a year of pandemic and political and racial tensions in the US and other parts of the world, these issues have become even more critical for businesses to address. So we’re going to talk to Shelly about how she’s built on her own experience to make things better for others and what advice she has for leaders trying to do the same. She also has a new book out, it’s called No Blanks, No Pauses: A Path to Loving Self and Others.
Shelly, thanks so much for joining today.
SHELLY MCNAMARA: Thank you, Alison. Great to be here.
ALISON BEARD: So let’s start by talking about privilege, something you mentioned in that speech in 2012. Some people might look at you and say, “You’re an educated white woman, a senior leader at a big company, you have lots of privilege.” They might not know, which I do from your book, that you grew up with 14 siblings and a mom who worked nights and weekends and as a nurse, or even think that it’s a big deal that you’re married to a woman. So how do you think about privilege and encourage others to consider it their own?
SHELLY MCNAMARA: Well, first I want to acknowledge that, absolutely, there are some advantages or privileges that I’ve had in my life and that I benefit from and you named a couple of them, right, one is being white and another is having the opportunity to have a great education. I would also say, because of my membership in a few different communities, one of those being the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer community, there are also disadvantages I’ve had or lack of privilege if you will, and I write about a couple of them in my book. I write about having a long-term life partner and our inability to both legally marry and legally have responsibility or legal rights over our own children. I mean, the third one is cultural, which is sort of being at the other end of jokes or a negative narrative that I internalized and began to feel shame about. So absolutely, human beings, we’re complex. It’s rarely all or nothing, and as you say, I have a mix of that.
I think what’s important for me and what’s been important on my journey is to pay attention to where I do have privilege and to use that to benefit others who don’t. What I’ve learned is the importance of allyship. Right. So when straight people got louder and more clear about their support for people who are LGBTQ, there were some changes that we made, sea changes, really. Members of the LGBTQ community, we help drive a lot of that, and we couldn’t have done that without our allies.
And so, I feel the same thing about racial equality. I do know the experience of being white, and I know that it has made a number of things easier for me. And as a result of that, I take the work of driving racial equality and using the insights that I have from my own journey and my passion for equality to address the issues of racial inequality.
ALISON BEARD: And as a senior corporate leader, how do you balance the needs of various marginalized or underrepresented groups and really make sure that all these different types of people feel heard and seen?
SHELLY MCNAMARA: First, my job is to serve the 100,000 employees at P&G that sit in 70 or 80 countries around the world. And in the space of equality and inclusion, number one is we rest on a very strong foundation, specifically, we have, I call these just foundational concepts and choices that we’ve made. And one of those choices that we’ve made is that we want to reflect all of the consumers that we serve around the world, we want to reflect the consumer. So, as a result of that, it’s very important to us to build a diverse representation of employees.
Another thing in our foundational choices is that we respect all. And as time goes on and you want to be relevant in the moment, you get more and more clear about what does that mean in today’s moment, right, to show respect for all.
And third is, we’re very clear that it requires us, in order to do those two things, we have to intentionally and thoughtfully work on creating a community, a culture, and an organization where everybody feels seen, valued and heard. So we have to pay attention and talk about what’s getting in our way. We have to talk about what are the patterns that drive gender inequality? We have to talk about the representation of the organization. And where we don’t reflect the consumers we’re serving, we have to ask ourselves the tough question, what’s getting in the way of that and what do we need to do about it?
ALISON BEARD: And the global reach of your organization is very interesting to me. Sitting in the United States, I think about sort of the demographics of this country, but you’re having to look at all of the places you operate and say, “Okay, who in this country is under-representative? Where do our employees not reflect our customers?” So how granular do you get with sort of each region of the world or country?
SHELLY MCNAMARA: We have some parts of our work in equality inclusion that is more advanced and some that’s less advanced. And in the U.S., I think, I would say, that’s one of the geographies in the world where we’re more advanced in terms of what we’ve been doing and how long we’ve been at this work. It also happens to be where our global headquarters is. We’re headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio. So, statement one is, yes, absolutely.
You can’t take in 80 countries and say, “What do we do in 80 countries?” You really have to start to break that down. And we think about our business in terms of regions of the world, and then we think about our business in terms of specific countries. Within the US, we look at multicultural groups, right, and we dissect within that, right, African-American, Hispanic, Asia-Pacific, native American. And so, we look within and we segment and we actually have targets within the US of what we want and what we aspire to have our organization look like. So we’ve been very clear that we aspire to have our organization be represented by 40% of multicultural employees. And then, we segment within, and we work on plans with our business leaders to make that happen.
From a gender point of view, we can make that a more global look because around the world, women are about 50% of the population. The MBAs that we recruit, or the business students that we recruit, or other degrees, generally, women are also represented in a substantive way. So, on a global level, we’ve said we aspire to have equal gender representation, really, at every level. So, that one’s a bit easier.
Then when you get to the sort of multicultural or racial or ethnic differences, there’s a different answer depending on what geography. But what I would say is, we are doing thoughtful and intentional work to see where are those countries. And we’ve started with some of the biggest countries where there’s some of the biggest need, countries like Brazil or the UK, for example, where you can see patterns of discrimination and marginalization and disadvantage in some of our consumer groups. And when I say consumer groups, it also means talent groups. So, black and brown people in Brazil, 51% of the population in Brazil identifies as black Brazilian. And what I can say is that is not what our talent base currently reflects at P&G. But we’re working hard to say, how do we make progress against that?
ALISON BEARD: And then you layer in LGTBQ, maybe disability, neurodiversity. So, it’s very complex.
SHELLY MCNAMARA: It is. And your original question was around the granularity of it. And so, what I went to was representation in terms of target groups that are specifically identifiable and recorded by the government. And there are other groups, right, other identity groups and other people and groups that you mentioned. So, on a global basis, the areas that we look at and intentionally do work for are LGBTQ, which is relevant around the world, people with disabilities, and gender. So those are the three that we’ve been working on for some time.
We’re also at a turning point, maybe I’d say, a new chapter in our work, because we are in the midst of launching a new platform, a new data platform. And as we do that, we are expanding the data fields that we’re giving employees the opportunity to self-identify. The data fields are not the same for every country, but we are going to have the opportunity, as an example, in countries like the US, to provide more opportunities for identifying along gender orientation, right, sexual orientation, disability or ability level. Which is terrific, because it’s going to give us a whole renewed data set to understand our employee base and figure out where we both have challenges and opportunities that we need to address.
For someone like me who’s been working in this space for years, I can tell you the progress that we’ve driven and I’ve driven with my teammates around the world to make progress in gender. I can’t tell you today what our representation looks like in some of the other communities, because we don’t have the data.
ALISON BEARD: For a long time, it did feel like DEI was siloed in a lot of companies within the HR department, sort of not at the C-suite table. Is that changing? And if so, how do you recommend that we make that sustainable?
SHELLY MCNAMARA: Well, I will say that, for us, it is built-in. So, what we talk about is the difference between having our diversity, equality and inclusion work built-in or bolted-on. And we’ve worked very hard to ensure that we’re building it in. We have an active strategy in the areas of employees. We have a series of actions in our brands. We do work with partners around the world to help expand equality. And we do work in our communities to activate work.
So, we have a very comprehensive strategy and it’s owned from the top. Right. So I report to our CEO and the plan and strategy we have is owned and driven by him and his leadership team. It’s not my plan, it’s our plan, it’s our collective plan. And I believe very deeply that it’s important in this work to be clear on the “why are you doing it?” and then, the “how?” both, right, and what impact do you want to make, or what measurements do you want to have? So I do think that companies need to ask themselves, what does it mean for them and why?
ALISON BEARD: So, what advice do you have for people working in organizations that are just beginning this journey, perhaps sparked in the United States by the racial turmoil that we’ve seen over the past year and a half, people working in diversity and equality and inclusion, but just who don’t have that traction yet? How do they get it?
SHELLY MCNAMARA: I was talking with someone the other day who was asking my advice on this, so someone who’s new in my role at a different company. And one of the things that I said to her was, you have to be clear on the outcomes you want. And one of the reasons that my title is chief equality and inclusion officer is because it’s focused on the outcomes. Those are outcome statements. And equality is the experience of being equal, inclusion is the feeling of belonging.
So first is this work of getting clear on what is it that you aspire to create or do? What are the anchors for your company that are congruent and consistent with this work and this intent? And then, who are the change agents? Who are the business leaders that understand the relevance of this conversation and this work to business growth? Right. Who are those? Because they’re there. They are seeing and understanding. And what is the data that tells them that?
And then, lastly, you start to socialize that, right, start to build that narrative and that conversation that says, this is who we are, this is what we stand for, this is what we aspire to create. And here’s the data that tells us this work is important and good. And then, building it into the work and not bolting it on, but building it as a core part of the strategy.
ALISON BEARD: And what about moving people into senior leadership roles, how do you work to do that? And what best practices do you have to share with other companies?
SHELLY MCNAMARA: There was a chapter of work that we started at P&G around 2015, and I was one of the leaders who was a part of that. And what we did is we got very transparent and very visible, we made our data very visible, on representation. And we looked at it and then we said, “Now, how does this compare to who we say we want to be?” We disaggregated the data, we looked and we said, “Here’s our executive suite, the senior executive suite, here’s the broader executive suite. And how many women are there?” Right. “How many men are there?” We’re in the U.S. data, right, “How many African-Americans do we have here? How many Hispanic?” We look to ask ourselves the question, “Are we living up to who we said we are and what we want to be?”
And then what we had to do was take apart the talent system itself, all of those levers that ultimately determine – I’m trained in organizational transformation, that’s my educational background. And there’s a phrase that says every system or every organization is perfectly designed to get the results it gets. And what that really means is when you have the outcomes and the results, and we were looking at our representation data by level, by segment of the population, and we weren’t representing who we said we wanted to. We had to take apart that system and say, we have to change this system. We had to do things like, say, every manager, starting at the second level of management, will have a designation of potential. Because what happens is people get promoted and then if you ask, “Why don’t you have a more diverse group?” It’s like, “Oh, there weren’t any women available” or there weren’t whatever.
And the truth is, as you go back into the system, you realize the system was perfectly designed to get the results it gets. So we had to change things like, “No, everybody will get a designation.” So now it’s transparent. “Is Shelly considered at level, is she considered one level of potential or two-level of potential?”
When we were at our key bands of management, we said, “You have to show your pipeline of talent. Now, who is in the pipeline to go to band four of management of leadership?” And if it’s not diverse enough, it doesn’t represent the holistic range of humanity that we want, we’re going to ask you to do more work and you’re going to build towards that.
Another example that I’ll give you, Alison, is attrition. And there were myths that we were losing some of our black and brown employees at a higher rate because they were so highly recruited and they didn’t want to live in the Midwest, they wanted to live on the Coast. And those were some of the stories that we told ourselves. And when you got into the data, and we did focus groups, what we realized was, one, the attrition rate was much higher than it was for the majority culture, right, at early bands in the company. And we said that’s not acceptable. And then we found out some of the reasons why and what we need to do to fix it. And I can tell you, it took us a little while, but we are now, for the last couple of years, we have, our attrition rate of our African-American employees is at the same as our Caucasian employees.
ALISON BEARD: So what were some of the reasons why they were leaving?
SHELLY MCNAMARA: One was career, and I mean, visibility and commitment to career development. Another was community, both a sense of community within the company and within the environments in which they’re part of. So in that one, we’ve invested quite a bit more in being very public about our, not only our desire to build a diverse organization, but also to do some of the community-based work. So I’d say, career and community were two of the biggest reasons.
ALISON BEARD: Obviously, we’ve gone through this huge reckoning. There’s a growing realization that equity and inclusion and belonging is important in many companies all around the world. But you do also see increasing complaints about companies being too woke and worries that some groups, particularly white men in the United States, are now being marginalized. So how do you respond to that?
SHELLY MCNAMARA: Well, one, and I said this earlier, my job is to have all 100,000 employees at P&G feel welcomed, be welcomed and have the space to be their authentic self. So straight up, that’s my job and I have to make that happen. The other thing that we’re real clear about is, again, I think, data helps, is the data tells us that we have some work to do. We’re committed to do the work that’s necessary to be the company we say we want to be, and to serve the world’s consumers with the products. And we believe that addressing where we have inequities is important work to do. And we don’t shy away from that. That’s not a political choice, it’s a business choice. And I know there’s a lot of narrative today that may question that or may wonder about that. And I mean, that’s all I can say is it’s an end. So, there’s a commitment to build and develop all of our employees. But we won’t shy away from those things that are getting in the way of accomplishing what we set out to do.
ALISON BEARD: So, white men aren’t being marginalized in the broader corporate world, it’s more that everyone who’s qualified and has potential is rising together?
SHELLY MCNAMARA: Yeah. I mean, my job and our job is to cast a net for finding great talent. That’s what we do. And we cast a broad net and say, “We want to get a broad range of talent and a broad range of humanity.” We don’t set out to say, “There are people we don’t want.” We set out on the positive, we say, “This is what we want, we want a broad range of humanity.” And the population we serve has changed so when we say we want to look… We have an aspiration to be 40% multicultural in the US. The reason we say that is it’s behind a business choice, we want to reflect the consumers we serve. And so, that’s not a choice to leave out, it’s a choice to reflect. And we don’t set out to marginalize anyone.
ALISON BEARD: When you’re leading at such a large company, how do you make sure that all of this is happening on every single team, ideally, every day? You can set the strategy at the top, you can put policies into place, but sort of the interactions between bosses and managers, you don’t have direct control over that, so how do you make sure it’s happening on the ground?
SHELLY MCNAMARA: Yeah, you’re right. I mean, on the ground behavior, on the ground engagement is really important, it’s what shapes the culture. And two things I learned in my educational background that really important, one is that leaders shape culture by how they behave, how they show up, what language they use, who they include, who they don’t. So leadership behavior is incredibly important.
A second thing is what you measure, it tells people what’s important, it drives the activity system of an organization. So what are we doing? And what do we do? I would frame it into three buckets, for me, one is, it’s about expectations, accountability, and capability. We have set very clear expectations about when we look through this filter or this lens of equality and inclusion of what we’re going to do as a voice, as a company. All of our leadership is very clear. And my job is to work with my colleagues to make sure and have that message come from the top of, what do we expect of leaders?
The second thing is accountability. We have mechanisms and systems and rituals that hold people accountable. Matter of fact, one of the things that I’m working on now is looking at… Our CEO looks at a collective body of evidence as he assesses the performance of his executives each year. He looks at how they do on market share, on pricing and profit, on all kinds of things that are relevant for the business. And one of those things he looks at is related to the organization and what have those leaders done to grow and develop an organization. And so, we hold them accountable.
And then the third is capability and culture. I call this third lever capability and culture. And what we do, and that’s where your question started, but I wanted to make sure you got all three of those, is that we’ve worked on three core areas related to culture for the last few years. One is, helping all of us understand implicit bias, and that’s continued learning, continued growth. The conversation around bias has been one we’ve had for a few years and we’re continuing to learn and grow. And it’s really become more commonplace in our dialogue, right, for people to own up to, like, “Hey, I’m a bit biased here.” Or, “Wait a minute, I got to check myself on this one. I’m a little biased because of…” et cetera. So, the learning around bias has been essential for us in terms of culture.
I think the second one for us is privilege, and you asked about that earlier, but really understanding, in what domains do I come in with privilege or advantage? And how do I own that and then make sure that I correct for that? So, that’s the second concept we work on quite a bit.
And then the third is what we call the, again, social science, but it’s insider or outsider group. And we have more work to do there, but really noticing the patterns. When you bring human beings together in groups, there’s patterns that happen. And those patterns are, there’s an insider group and there’s an outsider group, and there’s patterns to how things unfold. And you have to correct for things so that everybody feels they have a voice, they can participate, they can engage. So our capability work is endless, but those are three of the concepts we’ve worked on quite a bit.
ALISON BEARD: And drawing on your own experience as a lesbian and your work with colleagues who are coming from marginalized groups, what’s the one thing that you would like to see managers, not just at P&G but at other companies, do to make their employees feel more included?
SHELLY MCNAMARA: I absolutely want all leaders to identify, what can they do? I say, they. What can we do? I’m a leader and I know that I have the ability to act and behave and speak in ways that have people feel more or less included. I know that. So what can leaders do? I think it starts with learning who’s in front of you, being curious about the people who work with you and for you and learn about them. I love the phrase of, “Lend me your eyes,” right, “Lend me your eyes for a day. Lend me your…” What does the world look like from where you sit? And I mean that in a general way, I mean it like, what if we all approached each other from that place of curiosity? How might the world be?
And the second piece is, if underneath it, what I was committed to as a leader, what if I was committed to say, “I don’t want anyone who’s around me to feel less than. I do not want that. I want everyone to feel as powerful, as strong and as valued and supported as everyone else.” So I think, I like the combination of those two things. One is the curiosity about learning who’s with you and who’s working with you and for you. And then our job as leaders is to unleash their greatness, right, and finding out who’s in front of you and how do they look at the world? But then learn, what are their pride points? Right. What are they proud about, about their strength areas, their skill areas, things they’ve made happen in the world, in their work? And your job is to create a space for them to do that again, to make that greatness happen.
ALISON BEARD: Terrific. Well, thank you so much. That’s good inspiration for all of us. Thanks for coming on the show.
SHELLY MCNAMARA: Thank you, Alison.
ALISON BEARD: That’s Shelly McNamara, she’s chief equality and inclusion officer and executive VP at Procter & Gamble. She’s also the author of the book, No Blanks, No Pauses: A Path to Loving Self and Others.
This episode was produced by Mary Dooe. We get technical help from Rob Eckhardt. Adam Buchholz is our audio product manager. Thanks for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. I’m Alison Beard.